A bee colony optimization algorithm to job shop scheduling

Abstract

In the face of globalization and rapidly shrinking product life cycle, manufacturing companies are trying different means to improve productivity through management of machine utilization and product cycle-time. Job shop scheduling is an important task for manufacturing industry in terms of improving machine utilization and reducing cycle-time. However, job shop scheduling is inherently a NP-hard problem with no easy solution. This paper describes a novel approach that uses the honey bees foraging model to solve the job shop scheduling problem. Experimental results comparing the proposed honey bee colony approach with existing approaches such as ant colony and tabu search will be presented.